Featured Authors: Hilda Kean and Paul Martin

We're looking ahead to the publication of The Public History Reader in March and have selected Hilda Kean and Paul Martin as our authors of the month. Click here to read more on Hilda and Paul, the book and current events surrounding the destruction of archives at Ruskin college, Oxford.

Dr Hilda Kean is former dean and director of public history at Ruskin college, Oxford where she established the first MA in Public History in Britain. Her books include London stories. Personal Lives, Public Histories and People and Their Pasts - Public History Today with Paul Ashton.

Dr Paul Martin was tutor in public history at Ruskin college, Oxford 1997-2012. He is currently a distance learning tutor with the School of Museum Studies, Leicester University. His books include Popular Collecting and the Everyday Self and The Trade Union Badge.

Praise for The Public History Reader

“Kean and Martin's volume will be invaluable for anyone interested in public history. It is characterised by its generous reach: it includes work and ideas from many countries; it stresses the diverse forms public history takes and the range of communities that actively participate in making it; it shows how it can be innovative and challenge settled assumptions about both the past and its representation. This book will help its readers think in an engaged yet critical manner about the processes and social practices underpinning public history, and its complex, sometimes disturbing resonances in everyday life, for example, when atrocities need to be recognized and understood. Hilda Kean and Paul Martin have provided an extremely useful point of access to one of the most lively and important parts of history today." - Ludmilla Jordanova, King's College London, UK

Further Reading

Visit Kean's website where her blog expands on issues of public history and you can read about Hilda's recent involvement in the campaign against the desrtruction of student files at Ruskin college.

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Drawing on theory and practice from five continents, The Public History Reader offers clearly written accessible introductions to debates in public history as it places people, such as practitioners, bloggers, archivists, local historians, curators or those working in education, at the heart of...